“You could walk in any time...Hardly anyone in America went to the beginning of movies until Alfred Hitchcock’s campaign for Psycho (1960), when late arrival was forbidden...” — Peter Bogdanovich, “Old Dreams,” in Silent Screens

Harold Lloyd in "Safety Last" (1923)

As a child I loved sitting down with my popcorn fifteen minutes into Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and trying to figure out exactly who that man and woman were (a scientist and his wife, it turned out) and what exactly was happening with the aliens. After the feature was over, I watched Sylvester and Tweety, and a couple of trailers, waiting patiently through MovieTone News, munching on the grannies in the bottom of my popcorn tub. I was not alone; people had straggled in at various times. The movie would start up again soon, and I’d find out at last what the main character and his wife had been doing when I sat down. Having reached my recognized entry point, I--or we, if I was with my family--got up and headed for the door. All of this seemed completely natural, we went to the movies--it was a package deal, a continuous loop. Then it all changed. “No one but no one... will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance of Psycho.” Hitchcock went so far as to have this sign posted at all theaters where his epic thriller opened. Was it really Hitchcock who made us pay attention to being on time? The movies of my adolescence — Tom Jones, Cleopatra, Dr. Strangelove —were movies you didn’t want to miss the first fifteen minutes of. By the time I walked into the lobby of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace I was involved in running in 1976, the film was the thing, the whole thing. MovieTone newsreels had been gone since 1963, and cartoons, though sweet, cost an extra fifty bucks (as much as the second feature) to run.

Most of our patrons were grownups who didn’t care anymore about Bugs or Daffy Duck; they got their news from television. Our mid-seventies audience had come at the appointed time to see Taxi Driver or Carrie or Don’t Open the Window — whatever it was we’d advertised on the movie page that week. They sometimes got a little surly if too many “short subjects” intervened.

Dean’s nickname for one particular patron was “Time Clock,” but box office staffers had another name for him, a middle aged man (accountant?) fixated on the actual start time of any film we ran.

“It’s three minutes past eight o’clock,” he’d state emphatically, pointing at his wrist.

“Yes,” I said, “...and your problem?”

“The film is scheduled to start at eight; it said so in the papers, on your sign board, and in that infernal message I hear when I call the theater.” (We were proud of our answering machine, one of the first of its kind).

Over his shoulder and through the glass partition that separated the auditorium from the lobby, I could see the trailer package grinding away, nearly 11 minutes of COMING ATTRACTIONS, for films we mostly couldn’t afford.

“I think,” I said, “it’ll start in six, maybe seven minutes...”

And we were off.

“That is preposterous!” he ejaculated. “I paid good money for an eight o’clock movie! Truth in advertising! I want my money back.”

Dean appeared, shrugged and reached into his pocket for a dollar and two quarters, and placed the ticket price in the man’s small immaculate palm.

He stormed out the door.

“Who is this guy?” I wondered.

“Staff calls him Tic Toc, but I think of him as Time Clock,” Dean explained.

Tic Toc was not the only patron obsessed with time. A mother surrounded by three children of various ages stood outside the box office one Saturday afternoon and, after purchasing four tickets, inquired when the main feature would start.

“It started only about five minutes ago,” Brenda responded.

Puzzled and disappointed, the mother asked, “Well, could you re-start it? Traffic was terrible...”

Brenda actually stopped chewing her perpetual gum and stared at the woman. “No way,” was all she could muster.

I was getting my hair cut yesterday, so asked my stylist — a friend of many years and one of the most savvy movie critics I know — if, when he was growing up, he’d been in the habit of arriving late to movies. “Absolutely not!” he replied, “My whole family...we were always on time; it was important to us.” So there you go, and Bogdanovich be damned...?

A movie theater is a storefront business: if there is one thing I learned in the single year I pitched in to run a 2672-seat movie palace (other than Don’t go into business undercapitalized) it was Waiting for customers sucks. Any five-year-old with a lemonade stand learns this really fast, but lemonade stands get a pass: they don’t pay rent to anybody, and the lemons are usually free. What do you do at the St. George Theatre, on a Wednesday afternoon, when nobody but nobody is coming in the front door? You wonder how to pay the deposit for the next picture — and you dream up ways to drive more people in under the marquee for popcorn and a movie. So it was that we made the acquaintance of a fellow entrepreneur, Chubby, owner of a restaurant down the street called Casa Barone. It was an uncomplicated eatery that sold burgers and fries, wedge salads, the usual stuff, but for our down-at-heels neighborhood, it might as well have boasted four Michelin stars. Chubby was having trouble paying his rent too, so we partnered up.

The Dinner/Movie Special, as advertised in the local Staten Island Advance, encouraged the reader to... Clip this ad and receive FREE popcorn!

Check out our Dinner Movie Special — Dinner at Casa Barone, Movie at The St. George, both for only $4.79!

There were a couple of problems with this marketing strategy. 1.) The people with discretionary funds usually came from another neighborhood, where presumably they’d already had dinner, or were going out somewhere else afterwards. 2.) Most of our neighborhood patrons considered dinner and a movie to consist of a ticket plus popcorn, a hot-dog and some Good n‘ Plenty. (Our hot dogs were a cut above, Sabrett’s all-beef with dijon mustard on freshly baked Italian breads, so, in a way, they were dinner. I myself, as a matter of fact, dined at the concession stand at least four nights each week.)

The special was not a roaring success — we only ran it for about half a year — but at least the Casa Barone — another lighted storefront — actually existed on an otherwise darkening street. When we left in 1977, Chubby closed his doors as well. And so, in eventual succession, did the liquor store down the block — run by a former cop who withstood two gunpoint robberies and then thought better of staying in business — and most of the daytime vendors (the ancient barbershop with its white-haired barber, the print shop, even the local First National City Bank).

In “Fade to Black,” (April 6, 2003, The New York Times) Anemona Hartocollis observes, The shuttering of a movie house leaves an ugly gash in the streetscape. Walking under the vacant marquee...one can hear passers-by pause in mid-conversation to wonder how a movie theater could fail...The shock seems to remind them how essential a....theater is to a neighborhood's texture and sense of identity.The occasion for the above elegy was the closing in 2003 of the Olympia, at Broadway and 107th, an unprepossessing neighborhood house in Manhattan, “...a dark, smelly cavern with sticky gum spots on the floor and soda spills on the seats.”

We’d had our share of gum and soda spills at the St. George. After we failed, I had plenty of opportunity to walk under its vacant marquee, hurrying uphill at night in a neighborhood whose streets seemed to be getting darker by the minute. That’s what a theater’s closing does to a neighborhood, or a town.

But the opposite can be true. Post-millennium, old movie houses whose acoustics and interiors have somehow managed to survive the desolation of the seventies, eighties and nineties, are morphing into treasured live theaters, also, in many cases, serving as community centers. Think Loews Kings (these days The Kings) on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, whose opening gave new hope to a block of dollar stores and check-cashing services. One enterprising bar, just around the corner, sports a neon palm tree and reminded me, the Saturday we heard Gladys Knight at the Kings, of a favorite bar I used to linger at in Key West.

Think The Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, which, thanks to a bit of brinksmanship on the part of Henry Aldridge, a local organist and film scholar, and other volunteers, was saved from ultimate demolition in 1979, a dark-storefront time for Ann Arbor. A previous owner’s paint-over renovation was painstakingly removed, and today a theater-goer can enjoy “real gold leaf” and real butter on popcorn, while listening to the rare Barton pipe organ. Over several decades, Aldridge and his comrades gradually restored the Michigan to its original 1928 Versailles-style opulence.

And here’s to my friends at The Carolina (Greensboro, N.C.), a 2200-seat atmospheric whose auditorium’s ornamental columns and draperies suggest a Greek amphitheater. What happened to that theater in the nineteen sixties is a familiar American movie palace story: suburban retail businesses attracted citizens away from the heart of Greensboro; downtown inevitably declined, and the Carolina was reduced to triple-x titles. One of two things usually happens at this stage in the decline of a movie palace, and thankfully for the Carolina, better angels — not the wrecker’s ball — prevailed. After two cycles of renovation (one following a disastrous fire), the post-millennial Carolina sits at the center of a revitalized Greensboro. A casual visit to their site offers links to more than twenty restaurants —everything from four-star to coffeeshops.

The folks who are currently rescuing the Victory in Holyoke, Massachusetts may hope for a similar renaissance in that town over the next decade. [The Victory Theatre, Holyoke, Massachusetts]

Happily, the theater I served a year in, the St. George — like the Kings, the Carolina and the Michigan —was spared, and is these days a working live performance house. Shortly after it re-opened under the leadership of a local family, Rispoli’s pastry shop — home of a profound cappuccino, opened next door, and next to that a popular wine bar, Enoteca Maria. The theater’s leaking marquee — it leaked in my day too — has yet to be replaced (soon, they say), but there’s a warm light coming out from under it most nights, as you climb past at day’s end. Light is so important: it’s what the palaces are all about.

I grew up in an analogue world, a world where telephones stood in glass booths on the street or rested on their rigid plastic cradles at home, waiting to be dialed— that word signifying real finger-power. At the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace which, along with a group of inspired cronies, I helped to run in 1976, we had a wood-and-glass phone booth with an elegant velvet seat in it, a booth big enough for Clark Kent to change clothes in.

It stood just outside the box office, next to a heavy mahogany stand marked Western Electric, with slots for telephone books: Staten Island, Manhattan, Queens, The Bronx, Brooklyn. When we arrived, in April of our theater year, the phone in the booth still functioned. Hardly anyone ever used it. It sported a dial phone, though touch-tone technology had been around since 1963.

One day, a boy came to the box office window, complaining to Yvette — on shift behind the bars, “That phone don’t work!”

“What’s the problem?” she asked.

“I push the numbers ‘an nothing happens!”

Seems the kid was pushing on the numbers embedded in the rotary dial. 1963 was, by that time, thirteen years in the past, and — despite the fact that there were still rotary phones around — he hadn’t encountered any (after all, the mean age of our patrons was probably twelve or thirteen). Such frustration with outmoded technology may be the reason an angry unobserved customer tore the receiver off the phone one night in July, rendering it useless. I called New York Telephone (in those days, the service provider also installed and maintained the hard-wired equipment), only to learn that the utility didn’t think it was worthwhile replacing a phone that had only netted $6.50 in three months (we were supposed to get thirteen percent of that six fifty, or a fast eighty-five cents).

So the phone passed into obsolescence, and — with Superman nowhere in sight — the booth was largely a relic. Still, it served a few odd functions. At least once, a young patron — hoping to spend the night and raid the candy stand — hid out inside, scrunching down below seat level. The booth door was suspiciously closed — he was discovered and escorted out the door.

Wooden phone booths and church confessionals have something in common. I was reminded of this on several occasions, involving one member of the management staff, who also happened to be an investor in our failing enterprise. During the hard dark fall and winter which followed our disastrous cash-poor spring and summer seasons, he must have found solace in the booth, even if there was no priest to hear his story. Fall is traditionally a difficult time in a movie theater operator’s year, and in our case — overwhelmed as we were by debt — we pretty much knew it was all over. On more than one occasion, I came out of my office under the stairs and spied a pair of legs sticking out of the phone booth. They belonged to my comrade-in-arms, sitting in the booth, on the velvet seat, his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, for warmth.

The first time I saw him there it was a Tuesday, changeover night, the night before the day a new feature began. The octagonal canisters bearing the six reels of the old film were packed up and in the lobby, waiting to be exchanged for an equal number of canisters containing the new feature. Tuesdays had always been about hope — the only thing we actually owned. At sunrise, a bakery truck would arrive and lean two bags of small fresh-baked Italian breads against the middle outside door, hot dog rolls for Wednesday’s matinee.

Forty years later, it’s a Tuesday night. I can still taste the small sour spot in the pit of my stomach that wouldn’t quit while we had the theater, a wild kind of hope. Everyone who has ever tried to make it from scratch with a store-front business knows what this feels like.

Even a fully-caped Clark Kent couldn’t save us, but I pretended not to know that. We’d open the red and gold doors the next day, and people — somebody, anybody — would come in.

There once was a box in the closet under the stairs of the house I’ve lived in for forty-four years; it was marked ST GEORGE THEATRE in red crayon, and contained my files, hastily assembled on the windy March day we were forced out of our gorgeous if shabby 2672-seat movie palace. (For the full story on how exactly this came to be, Starts Wednesday — the book — is coming). But I digress. The box under the stairs contained a full history of our misguided enterprise: employee records, a list of creditors (by far the biggest file in the box), and a chronological list of every movie and concert we presented for the almost-full year we ran the theater. Somehow in one of the intervening decades, intent on closet-cleaning, I threw the box away. I have dreamt of it more than once: the book this blog supports, Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, grew from an essay I wrote around six years ago.

Back then I was convinced I remembered all of the movies we ran in our theater year, from April, 1976 through March,1977. But I was wrong. Memory is only a variation on fiction: it has taken me the better part of this last year to learn why eyewitnesses routinely identify the wrong person. Here’s to research, especially to researching your own early and misguided life — a humbling experience.

We’d opened with Blazing Saddles and Take the Money and Run, I was sure of those two titles. The third week, we ran Smile (a great little indie of the time, which I recommend) but what was the second feature? I couldn’t quite remember. I could clearly recall painting the outside pillars of the theater red and blue for Jaws, which I was sure we’d run on Memorial Day weekend. None of these factoids did I get right. It was Bananas — another Woody Allen comedy, not Take the Money and Run — that we ran with Blazing Saddles; Smile — a glimpse at the inner turmoil of beauty pageants — had been partnered with The Sunshine Boys, a comedy about two washed-up Vaudevillians. Good pairing, but they both bombed: all the neighborhood really wanted, we would learn as the year went on, was action and violence. As for Jaws, we (tragically) booked this summer classic for May 12, weeks before the summer really started. Obviously I hadn’t cared to remember what Smile was paired with, or that Jaws was in the wrong time-slot. As for the Woody Allen mix-up, my fondest — unconscious? — hope may have been that some big money would come along, we’d take it and run.

My solace and source of ultimate truth has been, these last few years, the movie page in back issues of The Staten Island Advance, our local paper. The New York Times may be available on-line as far back as its founding date in 1851, but the Advance (pronounced AD-vance if you live on the island) is accessible only via an arcane and frequently maddening research tool called microfilm. At the local public library, the microfilm-viewing equipment is, metaphorically speaking, horse-drawn. Fortunately the Staten Island Museum’s research department has computerized equipment that actually works, not to mention a kindly and helpful archivist. I dedicate this blog post to the museum in its glamorous new location at Snug Harbor Cultural Center.

Should you venture to ride the Staten Island Ferry some fine day as a tourist, it is worth your while to stroll the grounds of Snug Harbor, where indigent sailors of the 19th century (aka “Snugs”) spent their declining days in magnificent neo-classical buildings facing the water. While there, tour the museum and find out what “Staaten” means, learn the name for our island in Lenape, and find out why the hills of the north shore may be the best place in all of New York City to be when the polar caps have completely melted. Forgive me for all of this local pride; digression is the soul of the poet!

At the museum, my researches into my own past go something like this:

Load the microfilm (looks like an old-fashioned black and white home movie) onto the spool on the left-hand side of the machine, through a pair of glass plates and onto the take-up reel at the opposite side. The process is reminiscent oddly — and ironically — of loading a film projector. ​

On the desktop computer, which is synced to the microfilm apparatus, scroll to FF. It takes about thirty seconds to arrive at the first black and white images of a 1976 front page. I keep fast-forwarding, through ads for long-gone stores like W.T. Grants, through pages and pages of bell-bottoms, cowl-necked sweaters, puff-sleeved peasant blouses and leisure suits, sirloin steaks for $2.29, the comics, the obits. Day-in-the-life stuff once, but these days remote as the folkways of our Pleistocene ancestors. Then there it is, the movie page, enticing as an unwrapped gift: what were we showing?

Often enough there’s more than one surprise. Did Rock Hudson really star in something called Embryo? Why did we switch font styles — again — from "St George" in script to that dorky block lettering? The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea bombed the first week — boy do I remember that — so why did we hold it over? Second-guessing the past.

My first ventures into what is, in essence, the public record of our failure at the theater, have been fun and a little scary. But in this fortieth anniversary of that difficult year, I find myself oddly vulnerable to what I might find next in the microfilms, given my often sketchy memory — especially now that we’re well into fall, that most aptly named of seasons. I find myself holding back from completing the file on my desktop called “St. George Movie Chron,” because I know it will end. It did end.

Author

Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.